Peer-to-peer poisoners: A tour of MediaDefender

Ars profiles MediaDefender, a company that decoys, spoofs, blocks, and swarms …

A war of attrition

When your company poisons peer-to-peer networks for a living, public relations usually takes a back seat to discretion; quiet is the rule in the P2P content-protection industry. That's why Jonathan Lee, the company's VP of business development, isn't worried that the corporate web site is down when I reach him in his Santa Monica office. "It's kind of ugly anyway," he says.

For a company like MediaDefender, the largest such firm in existence, privacy comes naturally, but a 2005 acquisition by ARTISTDirect has encouraged the firm to take its services public as it starts to look beyond its original client base—music labels and movie studios—and dives headfirst into the brave new world of providing legitimate P2P content for advertisers.

Such advertising deals may be the future, but the company's bread and butter continues to be P2P disruption of movies and music downloads. MediaDefender is quite good at this, as it should be after five years of antipiracy work. Unlike DRM providers that focus on protecting the product, MediaDefender tries to protect the distribution channel—and only for a limited time. Recognizing that it is impossible to shut down the sharing of copyrighted works, the company focuses instead on mitigation. Record labels and movie companies can pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per title for differing levels of protection that extend over different time periods.

For most content owners, MediaDefender's services are needed at the beginning of a product's life cycle. Lee points out that most movies and albums makes the majority of their money in the first few months after release. MediaDefender's value proposition is not that it can stop such files from being shared, but that it can make sharing difficult for a month or two in order to give the legitimate product more traction.

Is it live or is it MediaDefender?

How it works

To work its magic on the various P2P networks, Lee describes four strategies that MediaDefender uses. All four are powered by a back end of 2,000 servers co-located around the world, and the company has contracts for 9GBps of Internet bandwidth. For a 60-person operation, these numbers are (to put it mildly) a bit high, but the scale of its system usually ensures that the company gets prompt attention and good deals when it goes shopping. It also means that employees who stay late after work to game on the corporate LAN always have a good connection.

Those 2,000 servers do four things that MediaDefender refers to as decoying, spoofing, interdiction, and swarming. Here's how they work...